Nosferatu and His Buddies

This year a generation is being introduced to Nosfaratu, but what about his predecessors?

In preparation for my upcoming episode with the Oscar Nominated hair, makeup and prosthetic designers of Nosferatu, I once again looked to my husband, Jayce, for help with the origin story of Nosferatu. There are experts in this field, but in the interest of keeping things somewhat easy to follow, I resisted a deep dive. I asked Jayce to write the run down of the basics in the history of Nosferatu and its iterations.

Here we go-

Get your stakes, holy water, and garlic out, here we go a huntin’ vampire history! In 1897, Dracula, the Gothic horror classic by Irish author, Bram Stoker, was published using a unique technique to tell the story of a blood-sucking vampire in novel form with letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. This is the one we read in High School.

Sources for Dracula include the scary legend of Vlad The Impaler (I hear you googling), and recently, it’s come to light that Bram Stoker may have simply liked thename ‘Dracula’ as he misunderstood it to mean ‘devil’ in Romanian. Dracula is considered the most famous and seminal work of Gothic fiction of the Victorian era and its social mores of gender, sexuality, religion, and race.

The first film adaptation was actually a lost Hungarian silent film, Dracula halala –The Death of Dracula – from 1921. Next, was the absolute masterwork of the German Expressionist movement, 1922’s Nosferatu by master filmmaker F.W. Murnau which changed key details of Bram Stoker’s novel to avoid copyright infringement changing Count Dracula to Count Orlok. However, Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence sued the studio that made Nosferatu with them agreeing to destroy all existing prints of the film by 1924! Thankfully, several copies survived, or we would’ve lost one of the most famous films ever made.

Next, was Bela Lugosi’s famous portrayal ‘I vant to bite your neeecccck’ in the Universal horror classic in 1931 followed 27 years later by Christopher Lee’s portrayal of the Count beginning in 1958’s Hammer horror classic in glorious color from the U.K. and continuing in a following series.

Many adaptations and variations too numerous to name here followed - most notably Werner Herzog’s remake of the original Nosferatu starring Klaus Kinski in 1979.

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and Gary Oldman with an insane accent as the Count which used all in camera effects is a personal favorite of mine.

Listen here for a great breakdown of the Coppola film via one of my favorite podcasts, What Went Wrong here. These episodes are great so be sure to subscribe while you are here.

This recent Nosferatu is based on the original 1922 version and is directed by Robert Eggers.

A little fun footnote…. actor Willem Dafoe who plays vampire hunter Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz in this recent version also starred in Shadow of the Vampire, a fictionalized version from 2000 about the making of the original Nosferatu where Dafoe plays tortured actor Max Schreck who portrayed the original Nosferatu… how meta is THAT?

Now that your brain is filled with spooky trailers, I bid you good-night. Let me know how it goes… yikes…

bye for now,

Jayce Bartok

Stay tuned for the next episode of Look Behind The Look where I’ll bring you stories from the set of Robert Eggers’ Nosfaratu from the Hair and Makeup Team who helped create the latest version of Count Orlok: Prosthetics Designer David White, Makeup DesignerTraci Loader, Hair Designer Suzanne Stokes-Munton.